**1. Introduction**

The dense population and rapid economic development in coastal zones in China cause frequent changes in land-use structures of offshore islands and intensify the conflicts among the production space, living space, and ecological space [1,2]. In order to achieve sustainable development of geographical space, in 2012, the Chinese government proposed the principle of the national territorial space development: optimizing the allocation of natural and socioeconomic resources for high-efficiency and intensive production, comfortable

**Citation:** Bai, R.; Shi, Y.; Pan, Y. Land-Use Classifying and Identification of the Production-Living-Ecological Space of Island Villages—A Case Study of Islands in the Western Sea Area of Guangdong Province. *Land* **2022**, *11*, 705. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land11050705

Academic Editor: Dong Jiang

Received: 6 April 2022 Accepted: 6 May 2022 Published: 8 May 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

living, and eco-friendly territorial space [3–6]. With the discussion and popularization of the concept of production-living-ecological space (PLES) [7,8], the identification of PLES [9,10], the evolution of PLES [11,12], and PLES functionality [13,14] have become research hotspots in the fields of landscape planning and urban planning.

Current studies on the identification of PLES mainly focus on the national land space [15], provincial spaces [16,17], and urban spaces [18,19]. However, PLES identification was rarely conducted in rural spaces, especially in island villages. With the increasing anthropogenic activities, the ecology of the islands has been experiencing critical deterioration. Moreover, the island ecosystem, characterized by a small area, low ecological diversity, and low self-regulating and restoring capacity, is fragile and challenging to repair [20–23]. Therefore, island land planning and management should be carried out from an integrative research perspective. PLES covers the ecological, production, and living spaces, and the classification of PLES is a comprehensive land spatial zoning [24]. PLES identification on island villages could help to find out the conflict and contradiction among the production space (PS), living space (LS), and ecological space (ES), with achieving co-ordinated developments.

Generally, the identification and division of rural PLES can be achieved by two mainstream methods: (1) the evaluation index system (EIS); (2) land-use classification (LUC) [25–27]. The method of EIS is usually used to divide the PLES by evaluating the function and suitability of each administrative unit [28,29]. However, it cannot be used to identify the PLES within the village because of the difficulty in obtaining the socioeconomic statistics at the village level. The method of LUC can identify rural PLES by classifying land-use types with the same dominant function and can be used to identify the multispatial characteristics of rural PLES within the village [30]. For example, Duan et al. [24] identified the multispatial rural PLES in Ertai Town of Zhangjiakou from the perspective of the villagers' behavior.

The existing LUC-related studies on PLES mainly used Chinese "Land-use status classification" (GB/T21010-2017) for spatial identification [31]. Nevertheless, the surface features of island areas cannot be highlighted by using this taxonomy. In this case, scholars who participated in the Special Project for Comprehensive Investigation and Evaluation of China's Offshore Ocean (908 Special Project) formulated an LUC system of islands [2], which can emphasize the surface features of the island–continent part. However, each island contains the island–continent part, island intertidal zone, and neritic region [32]. Thus, it is essential to combine the ecology and the utilized spaces of the intertidal zone and neritic region while classifying the land-use of islands. Furthermore, rural spaces in different islands have distinct resource combinations and utilization characteristics. Consequently, in order to find out the advantages and limitations of resources and utilization in various islands, island classification is necessary.

With the increasing exploitation, the island villages in the western sea area of Guangdong Province are commonly confronted with the following issues: (1) development and utilization behaviors such as reclamation and arbitrary quarrying which changed the topography and geomorphology of some islands; (2) severe destruction of the ecological environment; and (3) extensive utilization of natural resources. With a narrow economic base, restricting the protection and management of the islands. Previous studies in this area mainly focused on qualitative planning strategies, the islands' intertidal zones and neritic regions were rarely considered in the LUC-related studies, and research from a geomorphological perspective is scarce. Hence, the present study aims to fill these knowledge gaps using a remote sensing-based approach. The specific objectives of this study are to: (1) establish a PLES system for the island villages; (2) map the spatial distribution of secondary types of PLES; (3) explain the formation mechanism from the geographical perspective; and (4) figure out the conflict among the PLES and propose space-optimization strategies.

#### **2. Materials and Methods**
